Quantitative Attributes of a Healthy Democracy

Quantitative Attributes of a Healthy Democracy

Politics and International Studies

Quantitative Political Science -- Democracy Studies

Sebastian Smith

2025

Florian Reiche

Democratic functioning is faltering all over the globe. In looking to go beyond examining standard methods of democratic measurement, I undertake a systematic thematic analysis on one chosen attribute of democracy – government censorship of media – which serves as the conceptual lens of the inquiry. The inquiry is a two-pronged design. The systematic thematic analysis on the existing literature delivers its own findings, but these findings are utilised to inform a specific and deliberate selection of quantitative variables within V-Dem’s dataset to further explore the strength of inter-relatedness between separate attributes of democracy and determine a sharper quantitative view of democratic “health”. The thematic analysis yielded five interlinked themes – societal security, complaisant (participation and internalization), stickiness of censorship ecosystems, self-consciousness (fear, risk), and polarization – that provide insight into how censorship is enabled, experienced, and reproduced. These themes were then mapped to V-Dem type-C indicators to select one core measure, government censorship effort (media), and seven non-core measures, such as transparency of laws and media self-censorship. I compute annual means for each variable from 1950 until 2024 and assess bivariate associations. Apart from political polarization, the results show exceptionally strong correlations between the core variable and conceptually linked non-core variables, indicating a robust conceptual and numerical link between emergent codes and themes. Visual diagnostics of scatter graphs indicate potential non-linearities and historical shocks in the data that need to be investigated further. Overall, the findings demonstrate the establishment of robust connections between variables beyond the normal, baseline standards of electoral democracy and articulate a censorship ecosystem in which appeals to societal security and routinized self-censorship normalize repression.

Democracy, Populism, Politics, Data, Censorship